• The weekly comic strip “Tom the Dancing Bug” by Ruben Bolling won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ 2009 award for Best Cartoon in a ceremony that took place in Tucson on June 26. The list of winners can be seen here.

“Tom the Dancing Bug” is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate to about 50 newspapers and also appears in Salon.com. One of the characters from the comic strip, “Harvey Richards, Lawyer for Children,” is in development at New Line Cinema, where a live action comedy is planned.

• There seems to be a lot of legal issues surrounding Frank Frazetta’s artwork. Now, there are also a lot of press releases concerning the legal issues over Frank Frazetta’s artwork.

• Sandy Bilus unearths Marvel’s 1993 Annual Report — prepared at the zenith of the Ron Perelman era, it was presented in a comic book format, and the graphics provide a picture of a very, very different company 16 years ago (click for larger image).

Sweet Christmas! Can you believe it? A mere six percent of Marvel’s revenue was from licensing, while nearly half — 48.2 percent — was from trading cards! (Marvel owned Fleer at the time, and it was the height of trading card madness.) Wow, that sure didn’t last. Did anyone think it would?

Today Marvel is mostly a licensing company, with net sales in 2008 at $676 million. Much more in the link.

A sad story winds down.

It’s kinda shaky-cam, DIY level quality video, but damned if it isn’t Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, and hearing these two speak is one of the great comics experiences you can have.

Flog previews a…Marvel book? When it’s STRANGE TALES MAX, it’s the right thing to do! When it’s Jason doing Spidey, it’s super right.

Yow! We had so many debuts we had to split them up into two posts. In this one, we look at individuals and their debuting comics, books and minis. Thanks to everyone who wrote in!

Box Brown has two debuts and three books:
1) Xeric funded book Book “Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing”
2) The Ultimate Bellen! webcomic collection These Dreams Keep Me Going These Days
3) Unsyndicated Press: A newspaper collection of the failed Bellen! United Features Newspaper Strip

Bill Roundy: I’ll be exhibiting at the MoCCA Art Festival again this year! And I’ve got a debut: “The Amazing Adventures of Bill: the complete journal comics”, a 296-page tome collecting five years of my webcomic. I’ll also have a selection of gay romantic-comedy mini-comics, featuring monsters, pirates, and superheroes.

Peter Quach is a new cartoonist who will be selling his self-published TRANSIT at the show. “Transit is a story of being in your 20s in the city, somewhat lost, and yet not totally alone. It’s a story of transitioning from one era of your life to another. And it’s a story of the connections between people that sometimes keep us alive. Try before you buy: Read the whole thing online.

We’re still out and about on last day BEA business….wrap-up and photos later. For now, here’s a great story by
Steve Duin, with a photo of Paul Mavrides. Spain Rodriguez. R. Crumb. And S. Clay Wilson. Wilson nearly died a few months ago. Read the whole story for more.

As reported in Dark Horse’s solicitations for August, Bryan Talbot has a new book, GRANDVILLE, coming out, and it looks to be as unique as his previous works, if not quite the in-your-face mind bender of ALICE IN SUNDERLAND. It’s best described as a steampunk alternate history mystery with anthropomorphic characters, in the Euro tradition. As the solicitation puts it:

Two hundred years ago, Britain lost the Napoleonic War and fell under the thumb of French domination. Gaining independence after decades of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings, the Socialist Republic of Britain is now a small, unimportant backwater connected by a railway bridge, steam-powered dirigible, and mutual suspicion to France. When a British diplomat’s murder is made to look like suicide, ferocious Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard stalks a ruthless murder squad through the heart of a Belle Epoque Paris, the center of the greatest empire in a world of steam-driven hansom cabs, automatons, and flying machines. LeBrock’s relentless quest can lead only to death, truth . . . or war.

There’s a trailer up now. The cover is above and a random page is below. Many more previews at the GRANDVILLE page, linked to above.

Michael Fiffe does another one of his historical recaps, this time the career of David Mazzucchelli. We know the above ROM cover is something that no one would like to have remembered, but…he got better.

PS: We do have a copy of RUBBER BLANKET #2…somewhere in here.

It seems that comics stuff — illustrations and reviews and previews — are EVERYwhere now. The usual places and the UNusual places. For instance, we don’t remember Time Out New York running comics previews before, but here’s a nice preview of R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics, forthcoming from D&Q. (One such comic above.) The piece excerpted involves Mary Worth nosing her way into Macbeth’s business as he plots to kill the king and…oh, you just have to read it.

A more usual place for comics is the Village Voice — but not in the comics section, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog lately. Despite the dearth of weekly comics, there is still a cartoon presence. Ward Sutton has a comic about the new Star Trek movie (above), and does the cover. (Don’t worry, we didn’t spoil the joke — the whole thing is funny.) Sutton also sent us a link to his cartoon in The New Yorker. (Shannon Wheeler has also been spotted in the pages of The New Yorker lately, along with regular contributors like Chris Ware, Michael Kupperman and Adrian Tomine. Chris Mautner has more.)

Sutton ALSO has a piece on Star Trek in The Huffington Post, which brings us to our NEXT unlikely spot for comics — the Huffington Post! On Tuesday, cartoonist Bob Fingerman had an essay about his upcoming FROM THE ASHES, which we previewed only a few days ago:

So, memoirs. Memoirs in prose. Memoirs in graphic form. During the run-up to the 2008 election I was filled with guarded optimism and deep-rooted pessimism. As I alternated between pondering our potential collective fate and figuring out what my next project would be, a phrase popped into my head: “speculative memoir.” Why be limited, I thought, to recounting what’s already happened? Granted, true depictions of actual real life aren’t necessary in doing a memoir (James Frey, J.T. LeRoy and Margaret B. Jones, anyone?), but how liberating would it be to create a memoir of events yet to happen?

Good for Bob on the exposure — because we’re often told that The Huffington Post is the future of journalism…except that in a piece on a comic book, they couldn’t even run ONE PIECE OF ART? Come on now, people. You are the FUTURE. Don’t take a page from OLD MEDIA’S playbook. It’s all about the picture. Unless The Huffington Post is trying to be the place that is all about…not the picture? Hm.

As for more traditional previews, ICv2 has a preview of Jason’s LOW MOON, so you know it’s awesome, and Flog has a list of all kinds of LOW MOON goodies. Plenty to keep you busy on a Friday afternoon.

Aside from his NY Times serial, Mister Wonderful, Daniel Clowes hasn’t had a book come out since 2005’s ICE HAVEN, so word in The New Yorker of his latest project should be greeted by the slaying of calves and giant bonfires:

“I don’t even have a title for it yet,” he told me, but hinted that the plot concerned “a guy whose father dies, and he’s completely alone, so he tries to reconstruct what he’s lost, to approximate a nuclear family by joining people together.” Each page of the book is an individual scene, a joke on the format of a Sunday cartoon strip, but cumulatively the scenes create a larger narrative that turns from comic to tragic.

The piece has a slideshow of sketches from the project, one of which is shown below. Clowes also has the cover of this week’s New Yorker, shown above.

As part of the festivities leading up to this weekend’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, the Toronto National Post is running a HUGE series of charming interviews with cartoonists who are attending, with questions involving pen nibs, Rubik’s Cubes, aliens, and other stuff you don’t usually read about on the regular news sites . It’s too much for one sitting but dipping in here and there presents a pretty good cross section of what cartoonists are reading and thinking about — and they mostly come across as so affable, it’s kind of scary:
Mariko Tamaki
Antoine Dodé
Arthur Dela Cruz
Sparkplug’s Shannon O’Leary
Brian Evinou
Tom Neely
Joey Comeau and Emily Horne
Cecil Castellucci
Eric Kim
Florrent Ruppert
Jason Kieffer
Scott Campbell
Tara McPherson
Ryan North
Michael Cho
Graham Annable
John Malloy
Tim Fish
Tom Humberstone
Steve MacIsaac
Paul Rivoche
Willow Dawson
Erika Moen (above)
J. Torres
Jose Villarrubia
Troy Little
Jeff Lemire

Sorry to be so New York-centric this week but it really is a banner week for all things graphic in the Apple. Tonight, it’s SVA’s annual student comics convention, as reported by Matt Madden.

Most interesting for the general public will be Fresh Meat, the mini-comics convention for SVA cartooning students. You’ll find a range from first efforts to polished silk-screened artbooks for sale. Come check out the superstars of tomorrow!

Friday, May 1
Fresh Meat, SVA’s In-house Comic Convention
6 – 8 pm
217 East 23 Street (SVA’s Student Center “Monkeybar Lounge”)

Madden has a few other events later in the week listed in the link, but we can testify that you are virtually guaranteed to meet one future superstar of comics at every Fresh Meat.

Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for cartooning. As others have pointed out, the Pulitzer Prize winners this year seem particularly … absurd, given the media woes everywhere. For instance, the Union-Tribune is on the endangered list for daily metropolitan newspapers. Another Pulitzer winner was laid off back in January. Let’s hope the prizes perk things up.

A year or so ago, our good pal Bryan Talbot started telling us about a new artist that he had met in France, a French-Japanese woman named Veronique Tanaka who had created a rather unusual graphic novel called METRONOME that not only worked as an animated movie but told a story through meta images and syncopated storytelling. We remember thinking that Talbot seemed awfully interested in this artist’s work, as he was acting as her agent, but, well, comics folks are an incredibly helpful bunch, and it’s not all that unusual for them to help each other out. The book was eventually published in the US by NBM, Tanaka was interviewed by several websites — including Publishers Weekly — and then, as with many flavors of the minute, she disappeared into the great scrum of comics, back to her original world of “conceptual art.”

Or did she?

It turns out, Tanaka never really existed.

As revealed today on The Forbidden Planet Blog, Tanaka and Metronome were completely the creation of…Bryan Talbot.

NBM took the book believing Bryan was acting as Véronique’s agent, it was only after it had been accepted but before publication that he revealed the truth to them, when he said - “Terry Nantier… to his credit, he didn’t try and persuade me to put it out under my real name.” The book garnered some good reviews (personally I thought it was fascinating) but the sales didn’t match the good reviews and so Bryan has decided belatedly to come clean via the Page 45 Newsletter, Stephen Holland having been in on it from before publication (and equally as impressed with the book as I was before he knew it was actually Bryan experimenting).

Well, it certainly fooled me! I’ve got to say I quite like the idea of this - famous creators working under another pen name is far from unusual in the book trade, but the majority of the most famous rather spoil the idea by having “Joe Bloggs writing as Stack Powerhouse” on the cover, which makes the idea of having a different type of work from your normal ouevre taken on its own merits rather than as a work by the famous such and such rather redundant (frankly, other than to please the marketing department I never saw any sense in that approach at all, it’s like Batman wearing a top with ‘Bruce Wayne appearing as Batman’ on it.

To which we can only say…well played, Mr. Talbot! Thank goodness no one in comics journalism ever does an actual background check.

In remembrance of the 15th anniversary this week of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, cartoonist Ward Sutton offers“In Bloom, an alternate take on the life and times of everyone’s favorite dead grunge idol.”

Back in November, underground cartooning legend S. Clay Wilson suffered a severe brain injury that has left him incapacitated. While at first it was feared that Wilson would not survive, he has made a lot of progress — he’s laughing and drawing again but will need supervised care for the rest of his life.

That care will be expensive. Wilson’s longtime companion, Lorraine Chamberlain, has started the S. Clay Wilson 
Special Needs Trust, where folks can donate or help out:

Although he is still recovering in the hospital and beginning to draw again, (in his signature dense-pack style) his ability to earn a living in the future is in serious question. a depleted bank account and mounting bills make it imperative that his fellow man (and woman) come forward now and donate what they can to help this iconic artist develop a healthy, independent quality of life when he comes home to Lorraine Chamberlain, with whom he has lived for the past nine years.

He will need loving care for the rest of his life. Please help us do that for him.

draws…things.

Michael Kupperman has a blog!

Via LJ. Follow the link for MUCH, MUCH more Graham art and news.

[Note; we totally thought we had posted this last week, but it went up during a period of turmoil in Wordpress. Moral: we suck.]

New York City is lucky to have many awesome comics-related events, but one of the most awesomest was a recent conversation between comics demi-gods Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi moderated by Francoise Mouly. With a line-up like that, it’s no wonder the Skirball Center at NYU was jammed — we’d estimate there were somewhere between 400-500 people there on a Friday night. Images from the work of both was flashed on an enourmous screen, and both were effusive in their praise for one another, and talkative about their own processes. On paper it was a bit of a mismatch — Satrapi is witty and voluble, while Ware is known for his Herculean self-effacement. While on previous occasions we’ve seen Ware speak, he was genuinely shy, he’s now an absolutely hilarious and engaging speaker, and it’s safe to say both had the crowd eating out of their hands. But why take our word for it when an audio recording is up on WYNC?

Comment: Ware and Strapi have very different attitudes when it comes to discussing their own work. Strapi is comfortable and reflective while Ware’s adorably self-deprecating. When it comes to talking about your own art, can you relate?

One other thing that fascinated us about the event is that it was part of a larger three day festival of New French Writing that paired French and US authors in talks. There were some well-known names in the US contingent — E. L. Doctorow, Edmund White– and equal heavy hitters from the French squad — Bernard-Henri Lévy. However, after talking to a few people we confirmed that the cartoonists had the biggest crowd AND the biggest venue. Which is odd, because books without pictures are, in theory, more popular than books with pictures. But during the lengthy wait for the program to begin there was a palpable excitement for the superstars of cartooning to appear. Talking to a few non-comics affiliated folks at a reception later at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, they confirmed that Ware and Satrapi were the “rock stars” of the event.

We’re pretty sure Ware, in particular, wouldn’t be all that comfortable being branded a “rock star,” but as comics, graphic novels and “graphic books” get more and more acceptance and notice, it’s interesting to see that this kind of excitement is being generated over the creators. Hopefully, rather than it being a distraction or having a cheapening effect, it’s a sign of something we’ve long known: that cartoonists are important creators with important things to say.

All in all, a great evening. In the jump a larger version of the above picture where you can see how big the images were, because it was cool.

[Audio link via Jeet Heer]
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Legendary EC writer/artist Al Feldstein has told members of his mailing list that his recent and future comics convention appearances (including a canceled appearance at MegaCon) are canceled, due to some heart problems, and he’s currently awaiting admission to the Mayo Clinic for a heart bypass.

He writes that on February 24th, he blacked out while driving on his Montana ranch. After being taken to the hospital, testing revealed the need for the bypass. Because of his age — Feldstein is 83 — he’s a “high risk” candidate for surgery. However, the Mayo Clinic accepted him as a patient, and he’s waiting for the procedure.

Despite his health setbacks, Feldstein writes that he will “continue to send my usual rabble-rousing garbage…and please!, continue to send me yours.” He’s also enjoyed the outpouring of good wishes from his many fans.

As the editor of most of EC’s horror and crime comics, and the man behind MAD for 29 years, Feldstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential editors and writers in comics history. We snapped the above picture of him and fellow legend Jerry Robinson at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. Here’s hoping that Al is back to full health and back doing what he enjoys very, very soon!

TOKYO, a new triptych film directed by Michel Gondry, opened on Friday, and one of the segments is an adaptation of Gabrielle Bell’s comic book, CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK, in which a girl turns into a chair. NY Mag interviewed Gondry about the film, and he had much to say about it…and Bell:

Gabrielle actually did a comic book of Repulsion, so it’s part of her universe. It’s funny that you ask, because I think there’s a connection between Gabrielle and this Repulsion character. [Editor’s note: The heroine in Polanski’s film ends up killing a man.] Once I went to see a therapist with Gabrielle, and she was talking and talking and talking, and the therapist said, “Gabrielle, did you ever think of trying to kill yourself?” And Gabrielle said, “No.” And I said, “Ask her if she’s ever thought of killing somebody else — ME!” [Laughs.] When you work with Gabrielle, you never know what will happen.

§ Today’s MUST READ: Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Trib has a fantastic profile of Lynda Barry. Matt Groening, Chris Ware, and Ivan Brunetti all sing her praises, colorful thoughts and anecdotes are recounted, and lots of players and history are revealed:

I ask if she liked “Peanuts.” She says she appreciates it now, but hated it at the time—too melancholy for a sad child. She liked “Family Circus”—”You know how everything’s in a circle? I wanted to reach into it.” She recently met Jeff Keane, the son of “Family Circus” creator Bil Keane. She says she touched his hand and burst into tears.

Matt Groening says he tried to get Barry to go Hollywood in the ’80s. “I said to Lynda, ‘Let’s write a romantic comedy,’ and she agreed.” A pitch meeting followed at a Los Angeles movie studio. Groening remembers walking into the executive’s enormous office, where Barry immediately moved toward a cagelike sculpture in the corner and stood inside it.

§ A comic shop opens in Brooklyn!

§ John Jakala regards the upcoming manga-sized NEXUS reprints from Steve Rude.

§ Johanna Draper Carlson looks at Archie sales figures for 2008:

It’s that time of year again. Due to the way they mail subscriptions, Archie Comics are required to file Statements of Ownership, Management, and Circulation in their publications. So I collect the figures to see how an often-overlooked comic franchise is doing.

§ And Noah Berlatsky DID NOT LIKE old POWER MAN comics:

And lord, the art is horrible. I’ve argued at various points in the past that mainstream comics art has dropped off a cliff in recent years; this volume seems designed to make me eat my words. Frank Robbins and Lee Elias are the main artists in the run, and there’s just nothing to like about either of them. Bizarrely distorted faces, awkward poses, an utter lack of style or design sense; it’s just page after page of ugly, mediocre dreck. A few of the fill-in artists (Sal Buscema, Bob Brown) are somewhat better, but none of the drawing is what you’d call enjoyable until John Byrne (with Chris Claremont in tow) comes in for the last two issues. Not that John Byrne is my favorite artist or anything, but in comparison — well, this volume makes quite clear why he was hailed in some quarters as a demi-god.

Those Essentials are a double-edged sword, I tells ya.

There’s a new look to the Jeffrey Brown Comics website, and it includes GI JOE, among other goodies.

Is Jeffrey Brown the new Steve Ditko? Discuss.

Editorial cartoonist Brian Duffy was recently let go from his job at the Des Moines Register; after leaving, he discovered that his artwork, which had been left behind, was not going to be returned to him but was planned to be donated to the University of Iowa.

Duffy said he was always under the impression that his sketches were a joint copyright, just like when he published his book.

“Copyright Brian Duffy and the Des Moines Register, not just the Des Moines Register,” said Duffy. “I have no problem donating a large body of work to the University of Iowa. In fact, I’d love to do that.”

But he wants to do it on his terms not on behalf of the newspaper that shooed him out the door.

Now Ted Rall, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, has written an open letter to Carolyn Washburn, the editor of the paper:

Dear Ms. Washburn:

As President of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), I am writing to express the collective dismay of our membership at reports that you plan to dispose of Brian Duffy’s original political cartoons without his consent.

While your newspaper may claim ownership of Brian’s thousands of original cartoons he drew during 25 years as The Register’s staff editorial cartoonist, there remain compelling questions of what is customary and what is right.

Although it used to be common for newspapers to keep their cartoonists’ original artwork, that practice changed decades ago, and almost universally cartoonists now leave their newspapers with their artwork. These original drawings represent an artist’s life work, and while newspapers pay for the its production, they do so in order to publish the work on its editorial page—not to possess each piece as artwork.

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